The first big mistake I made as a DBA was coming to work with my zipper wide open. But I digress.Hear one of my most popular session via streaming media at SQLSentry.TV!Microsoft SQL Server is easier to administrate than any other relational database on the market. But “easier than everyone else” doesn’t mean it’s easy. And it doesn’t ...

In the same way that the finest presentations involve much more than the simple relaying of information, the finest software demos are much more than just presenting features. REMEMBER: The goal of a demo is to INSPIRE the audience to use the software/technology, not to teach them every nuance of software/technology.I've ...

2012 was, simply stated, a year that kicked my butt. When I wasn't struggling professionally, I was struggling personally. Health issues, culminating in a diagnosis of Type II diabetes, and the passing of my father soon after Thanksgiving marked my biggest struggles. I apologize to those of you who are normally on my Christmas ...

It's always a feel-good experience for me to return to SQL Saturday in Orlando, the place where SQL Saturdays were started by Andy Warren (Twitter | Blog). On this trip, I delivered a full-day, pre-conference seminar on Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning SQL Server. I also delivered a session on SQL Server ...

PASS SQL Saturdays are free 1-day training events for IT professionals interested in Microsoft SQL Server, providing a variety of high-quality technical sessions, all happen through the efforts of local volunteers. The leadership team of the local chapter of PASS here in Nashville (Facebook | LinkedIn) have ...

Even though I've recently changed jobs, I'll still be speaking at a lot of SQL events across the country and internationally. There are still a few trips that I've yet to finalize, in particular with the fine folks in Houston, run by my friend Nancy Hidy (blog | twitter), and my friends in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, run by ...

Here's an evergreen question. It's a question that never completely goes away. But lately, I've been getting it a few times per week. So I thought it's time to readdress the question, which usually takes some form of the following:I can't really do effective development on my little dev laptop because our production SQL Server database is 15 ...

Lucy, You Got Some 'Splainin to Do!'
Quest Software's latest community initiative, Windows Azure-based Project Lucy, has debuted! Project Lucy is part infrastructure analytics, part social media experiment, and part performance data warehouse.
The best things about Project Lucy include:
It’s Free - just like our SQLServerPedia ...

I did a lot of writing in 2010. Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job of keeping all of that writing equally distributed throughout all of the channels where I'm active.
So here are a few more posts from my blog, put on-line during the months of November and December 2010, that I didn't get posted here on SQLBlog.com:
1. It's Time to ...

I wanted to pass along this great info from Microsoft. There are literally oodles of free resources for Visual Studio programmers. In their own words...
Take Visual Studio for a Test Drive
Take this powerful tool
and its features for a spin by downloading a full Visual Studio 2010
trial version. Discover how Visual Studio 2010 ...